Thursday, May 5, 2011

I'm Just Here For The Story

I don't know what constitutes the story, tho.

Someone left me a 1 star review on Sweeps saying I apparently didn't even bother to do 1 revision.

It took me years to write the book and I wouldn't be surprised to find out I went through it 50 times. So why am I giving this person any credence at all. Well I'm not and I hope no one else is either.

Why bother reading? What is the point? These people are going so fast through these books that the last chick didn't realize Viva was never married to David, and this one can't see the story or something.

Maybe this is all about education. And I'm lumping MTV etc in with that because those entertainment outlets do train us. The whole notion of a story starting out slowly and leading you in, is so 19th Century. You can't do that now. I probably still do at times because I don't give two hoots and a holler. I'm not a commercial writer.

We have a generation and a half of people who do not sit down to savor a book , they're there to inhale it., gobble it down as quickly as possible and move on to the next comestible word source. They're not there for the details, they're there to find out what happens in the end. But the details are part of the story. How do you understand what's happening, what the motivation is, why people love or hate, if you're not paying attention to the details?

Or do you just want the main characters to get together at the end? If it's a "romance", don't we already know that so what's the rush? I feel like giving everyone a short cut and you can read the end at the beginning in order to save precious time.

I don't have anything smart to say about it.

I started to read Sheri Anderson's book. I think she's smarter than this but I'm sure the books will sell so that's the point, right? She obviously can handle the language but it's not interesting in this form.

When you're the headwriter for a show you write a lot of documents that tells the producer and the network where the story is going. There's a certain tone to this. You don't have a lot of room and they don't have a lot of time. They already "know" the characters from watching the show, so you don't have to get into any of that. You don't need but a hint of back story.

What you're going to load up on is plot. What's going to happen? How do all these characters and divergent pieces fit together? That's what this book reads like. Like a story pitch more than a novel. It's repetitive and unbelievable. There's no sense of the characters as live people, there's no sense of place.

But what I will tell you there's plenty of and that's produce placement. I have never read a book that was so full of brand names from the sheets to the shoes and everything in between. I better go take out the reference to Pratesi sheets in NLM2. I'll just say 2000 thread count sheets. That's fine, that works for me.

I'm sorry and I'm disappointed. I probably won't bother reading to the end. I don't know who any of these people are besides Marlena and John and am not fascinated by their incredibly toned bodies.

I finished Thomas Greanias' 2nd Atlantis book. This worked a lot better for me, less to imagine. I have to admit, I'm one of those terrible readers I'm talking about in that I'm skimming a whole lot. But I wouldn't go to Amazon and leave a 1 star review after essentially reading 4/5 s of the book. Again I suppose these books are very light on characterization so I don't know very much about the main players. It's light on the graphic violence and just a hint of sex so I give it high marks for that.

Here's another commercial I like very much. The young man is beautiful. Wowwee.